During a Tuesday meeting, State Board of Education (SBOE) members heard testimony regarding the proposed Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for English Language Arts and Reading as well as Social Studies, according to Texas Scorecard.
The proposed items would add a list of literary works to be taught in each grade level, as required by a new state law. The lists include titles focused on classic literature, U.S. and Texas history, and passages from the Bible.
Outlet KHOU says parents, teachers and advocates have raised concerns about the religious nature of the readings, the lack of racial, ethnic and gender diversity, and the overall length of the list.
Texas Scorecard reported that Vanessa Sivadge, president of Protecting Texas Children, told board members that the U.S. does not find its strength in diversity, but in unity.
Mandy Drogin is a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation who attended the SBOE meeting.
"They are bussing in organizations and radicals from all across Texas to testify. They have demanded we remove mentions of Christianity from our education, our curriculum. They are demanding that we put in Islamist nonsense. They are demanding that we take away stories about our great founder,” Drogin says. “They claim that George Washington was a terrorist. I mean, it's just radical lunatics."
According to the Texas Tribune, students testified to the SBOE that the new curriculum focused too much on “Western civilization at the expense of other cultures, lacks historical perspective of people of color, and prioritizes Christianity over other major world religions.”
Drogin also talked about the content of the proposed curriculum.
"This is a classically inspired literature list where we're going to make sure that our students are reading the great works of history — Shakespeare, C.S. Lewis — those pieces of literature that withstand and have withstood the test of time," Drogin says.
